Schools Looking for Ways to Keep Students In : Dropouts, Many Near Graduation, a Baffling Problem

Richard V. was one of more than 400 seniors in San Diego city schools allowed to participate in June graduation ceremonies even though he had failed to meet all academic requirements.

He was allowed to participate on the condition that he would make up necessary credits during summer school.

Few of the 400 showed up at summer school, however, even though they all knew how close they were to graduation, having been counseled repeatedly on strategies to salvage their final school year. For various reasons, they sacrificed their diplomas despite both the psychological and tangible benefits the piece of parchment would provide for their futures.

Richard V. was only one math course away--the easiest math offering in high school, yet he skipped summer school.

Earlier this month, his name and those of the others came before the San Diego city school board for cancellation of their graduation status, a four-month grace period, from July through October, having expired. Board chairman Kay Davis, reflecting on the district’s ambitious plans for fighting the dropout problem, asked whether more could have been done for a group of students clearly at risk yet clearly within striking distance of their diplomas.

“Could these kids as a group have been targeted in some way?” Davis asked during a subsequent interview. “If we’re going to be doing a big dropout prevention, aren’t these some kids we could grab right away?”

But a look at the case of Richard V. and several others from the group shows that the students were targeted repeatedly for help during their senior year--by counselors and by teachers trying to push them over the top. Each student had unique and longstanding problems. Taken as a whole, they illustrate the difficulty of meeting an ambitious district goal to cut in half within three years the dropout rate of almost 37%. Currently, more than one out of every three ninth-graders drops out before graduation four years later.

In September, Richard’s special counselor at Hoover High School contacted him to try to cajole the student back to Hoover’s night school to finish the math course. Marlowe Krehbiel talked to Richard and Richard’s mother. It was agreed that Richard would take a six-week night school math course from 3-5:30 p.m.

“He came for two weeks, but then I didn’t see him any more,” said Krehbiel, a 26-year veteran of teaching and counseling. So Krehbiel called Richard and his mother again.

“His mother said that he now had a (food-service) job and the class conflicted with it,” Krehbiel said. “I tried to impress upon her that he was just three weeks away from the diploma. I even talked to some of his friends who talked to him, and (I) had him come in and see me.”

Krehbiel told Richard that he could rearrange the math class around the student’s work schedule; he received a second commitment from Richard to finish the course.

Didn’t Take Bait

“I even put his diploma on my desk in front of him and said, ‘Look, here it is.’ But you know, I haven’t seem him since, and I just don’t know why this kid, who is not a dumb person, can’t bring himself to finish what is a very simple math class.

“(The result) makes us counselors look bad, the school look bad, as if we don’t care and aren’t doing anything. But we are busting our butts to work with these kids, yet there simply isn’t the commitment, the motivation . . . no dedication to follow through on plans that they verbalize and talk about.”

Several counselors emphasized that the group of near-graduates, despite their many problems and record of poor achievement, had been persuaded to remain in school until almost the final days. Many other students drop by the wayside far earlier in their high school careers.

The head counselor at Morse High School pointed out that almost every student on that school’s provisional graduation list had a history of poor attendance, and one or more course failures at each high school grade level. In many cases, Joe Ogilvie said, the students had unstable family situations, with one or more parents gone, and had suffered from a lack of caring and discipline which resulted in poor motivation.

The testing record of one student showed above-average ability yet, because of past academic failures, the student would have needed to pass all of a special seven-course schedule during spring semester (normal load is six courses), plus successfully complete two courses in summer school. The student’s file included his counselor’s numerical jottings to show the student how all the credits, if successfully earned, would add up to the minimum needed to graduate.

“He and others were counseled to death,” added Morse counselor Mary Sue Depass. “Their parents were contacted, often several times. But the parents are often at a loss over what to do when we call. They are as frustrated as we are and throw the problem to us,” forcing the school to deal with social problems often beyond its control.

Often the parents have split up, with children being shunted back and forth from city to city and school to school, resulting in what Ogilvie said is a tremendous turnover of students.

“In just the last two days, we have enrolled 15 new students, and that is not unusual,” he said. “There are so many cases where dad visits his ex-wife, decides the kid is not doing well there, so says ‘we’ll try a new place.’ Some kids have moved so many times that they simply can’t tell you in chronological order all the schools they have been in.”

Placement of students into new schools in mid-semester is an inexact science, Ogilvie said, and the stress of moving, plus an unsettled home life, puts students even further behind academically.

“In some cases, parents live from day-to-day and have no motivation themselves, so why should the student?” Krehbiel asked. “In one case, there is an alcoholic father and no mother, and the kid comes to school having had only a Coke or doughnut for breakfast. Is that a situation in which a kid can be successful?”

Combating the Problem

School Supt. Tom Payzant said that lowering dropout rates over the short term will prove more vexing than designing programs at the elementary and preschool levels that will pay off years later for students entering high school. Payzant serves on a special committee of the U.S. Department of Education that is trying to publicize long-range strategies being tried around the country.

“When we’re dealing right now with young people who have dropped out or are on the verge of doing so, we must enter the picture wherever we can, even though circumstances are complex and obviously unique,” Payzant said.

“You try to buy some time by discovering something to get the person re-engaged with education, such as referral to a special program or clinic, or to a (social services) agency with expertise in handling problems beyond ours, to somehow try and have an impact, to find something that may work.”

At Hoover, counselor Eddie Duenez runs a program for students perennially absent from school. He attempts to instill a sense of obligation among them without seeming harsh in his methods. At any single time, Duenez monitors about 40 students. They must also come to school on Saturdays to compensate for missed time, but Duenez has them doing learning activities rather than simply picking up trash or performing other menial, punitive tasks.

“They all know that a phone call is made to their home immediately if anything goes wrong,” Duenez said, conceding, however, that many parents see their children leave home in the morning and believe they are off to school, even when the truth is otherwise. “Parents sometimes don’t know either why the kids aren’t coming.”

Enormous Task

Duenez and his boss, Hoover Principal Doris Alvarez, do not pretend that either the attendance monitoring or other programs run by Krehbiel provide any panacea, particularly because they often cannot reach underlying problems bothering the students. Conversations with some of the at-risk Hoover students confirm the enormity of the task.

“I just don’t like getting up in the morning,” said one 11th-grader in Duenez’s Project Succeed.

“Sure, you can’t do nothing without a diploma,” another said. “The school tells you that, my parents tell me that. But the teachers could make things a lot more interesting instead of just repeating things all the time . . . in English class, it’s boring to do so much reading day after day.”

“My mom didn’t care if I came to school or not,” another 11th-grader said. “So when I didn’t go for most of last year, she just shrugged and said, ‘OK.’ Some guys would rather go smoke and drink with friends, and you can get used to it.”

One student said that constant phone contact to home by the school has made a difference in her attendance. “I think it helps when they get on your case all the time,” she said.

The same student said that without a change in attitude by her and others, “This country won’t be worth nothing, nobody will be educated and we won’t go nowhere.”

Long Way to Go

Sitting in on the conversations, Duenez reminded the students that while his reward is to see them all graduate, they all have a long way to go before righting themselves academically. “Talk is cheap,” he warned.

Morse’s Ogilvie wished that counselors could do more, but he said that the current counselor-to-student ratios of 1-to-400, or greater, prevent more follow-ups with all but those at greatest risk of dropping out. Holding a list of 75 students who failed to pass 11th grade at Morse last June, Ogilvie said that more than half had not shown up for class in September.

“Many move, going to a different school by living with extended family to get a new start,” he said. “Others may drop out, but we really don’t know” because the students are called only to find out whether they are returning to Morse, not what they plan to do instead. Many cannot be reached at all.

“We could keep three of four additional people busy, full time, just going out and looking for kids,” Krehbiel said. “Right now, I’ve got 15 kids that we just can’t find, period. And while we are in the process of sending out a letter to parents, that uses up three or four weeks.”

In all cases, more individual attention would pay dividends because many students have found both their home and school lives impersonal, Morse’s Depass said. She wishes that more home visits could be made to make parents more aware of their responsibilities. But that requires money, which Payzant admits the district does not have. For example, in summer school, where the bulk of the students are attempting to make up credits missed during the regular year, counseling is almost non-existent, and no effort is made to keep students from dropping the rigorous four-hour a day, six-week schedule.

“We just don’t have enough manpower to track down those students in the summer,” said Beverly Foster, assistant superintendent for school operations. Counselor-to-student ratios average as high as 1-to-900 during the summer.

“We have to admit that sometimes the schools do not reach out as they should, and we have to do better now because we are being held accountable” by the public, Foster said, noting the increased attention placed on the dropout problem nationwide.

Not Entirely Bleak

The picture is not entirely bleak. Point Loma High teacher Jack Dray, a veteran of many years of summer school teaching, said he has only had two or three students a year drop his government courses during the summer.

“I work damn hard in making the class interesting, and by showing television programs such as ‘Crossfire,’ I try to get across that academics plays a big role in their own lives,” Dray said. “Also, I give them direction by enforcing the rules on excuses, not vacillating on kicking someone out if he misses three or more classes.”

Many dropouts from the graduation lists will eventually come back and earn their degree through night school, Krehbiel said. Already he has gotten six of the 12 Hoover seniors who dropped out to enroll in a night diploma program.

“Eventually, those guys out on the street will find out that school is better rather than just sitting at home or at the Jack in the Box,” one of the at-risk Hoover students said.

“I occasionally run into kids I had (at the now-closed Wright Brothers continuation high school) for whom I wouldn’t have given two hoots in hell that they’d be successful,” Krehbiel said. “But somehow they finished school, got jobs, and have families, and are doing fine.

“That keeps me motivated.”

Depass said other at-risk students manage to respond to “my keeping on them so much that they’ll turn around and do what’s right.”

But while those success stories do occur with some regularity, Payzant said many failures have to be accepted while the district attempts to implement primary school programs, like those planned to reach parents as well as students.

“I’m more and more convinced that the key goes back to the early years of a child’s education, through the first three or four grades of elementary school, in terms of the best payoff from investing resources and time,” he said.

“In the meantime, we can’t get so burned out on pursuing a handful of students for whom we try to give everything that we neglect others who might respond more positively,” Payzant said.